Okay, here's where I stopped today. The original is really flat, so I tried to work on highlights and shadows to make it look more 3D (and make him look a little older). I went ahead with the lazy eye, and I left his earring in for now, I guess.

Thanks! If anyone has any ideas how to improve it, please let me know. I have a hard time knowing when something I've worked on like that is "done"... I feel like I could work on that tiny picture for days.

Thanks! If anyone has any ideas how to improve it, please let me know.

Do you adjust the colours of the existing picture, or do you grayscale it and recolour it from scratch? I've got the feeling that you used the first method. Personally, I find the later method to be much more effective. In the lighter areas of his skin, there seems to be some orange glow like in the original picture.

I think his neck is centered fine--I think Logi's problem may just be an optical illusion because the left side of his neck (from his POV) is shadowed by the jacket's collar and the right side isn't, so it might give the impression that his head is floating on that side. :headscratch:
If you felt like "fixing" it, instead of moving his head, you could try brightening that area a little--I wonder if that would solve it for him or at least help us see what he's talking about better.

Actually, if anything, I would say that his neck could be shortened a little, but that's probably just another illusion from his tall collar. This one's tricky!

[quote:Kazuya]Do you adjust the colours of the existing picture, or do you grayscale it and recolour it from scratch? I've got the feeling that you used the first method. Personally, I find the later method to be much more effective. In the lighter areas of his skin, there seems to be some orange glow like in the original picture.[/quote]
Thanks for the advice, you're correct. I've never tried the second way, but now I want to try. I'm not sure where I would start... do you start with high tones and go down, start with low tones and go up, or start with mid tones and go off of that? After you've recolored, do you make adjustments, or do you try to get the colors right from the start?

I had a really hard time coming up with a skin tone for Needle... I can't even figure out what ethnicity he's supposed to be! Maybe I'll have to check his alumni file again.

Thanks! If anyone has any ideas how to improve it, please let me know.

Do you adjust the colours of the existing picture, or do you grayscale it and recolour it from scratch? I've got the feeling that you used the first method. Personally, I find the later method to be much more effective. In the lighter areas of his skin, there seems to be some orange glow like in the original picture.

@sorca: After I grayscale the portrait, I usually brightern up the light areas and blur from there to the darker areas (but keep in mid thee "natrual flow" of the face structure). It all depends on how the grayscale picture looks like. Sometimes it is usefull to play with the contrast and saturation, sometimes the portrait is good like it is. It's not really an exact sience, it's art.

This is for example what my current work on Postie looks like:
I haven't "upgraded" the right cheekbone yet, contrary to the left one. See the difference? It's subtle but noticable if you look at it. When I'm done with his face and his clothes, I switch to RGB and recolour everything. After that it's time for rescaling and animation. Last but not least, I put him in front of sume ugly background, reduce the colours and call it a day.

According to my proportions study, the length of Vinnys neck is still in the normal range. Maybe it looks a bit lengthy, because I gave him a weakly developed trapezius muscle.
if you weaken the trapezius, you can see how incredible long a human neck can be.

@RoWa21: Okay, I will redo that later. I have brightened up his neck a little bit and I also performed some ear surgery. Vinnys right ear looked somewhat ehrm... "strange" (but that's original).

Did anyone notice that I changed Reubans ears? I also did some small changes to his glasses.

@sorca: After I grayscale the portrait, I usually brightern up the light areas and blur from there to the darker areas (but keep in mid thee "natrual flow" of the face structure). It all depends on how the grayscale picture looks like. Sometimes it is usefull to play with the contrast and saturation, sometimes the portrait is good like it is. It's not really an exact sience, it's art.

It's funny that you put it that way... that's exactly my problem--I'm a much better scientist than artist. That's why I started drilling you about the "process"--do you start with high tones and go down, how do I know what tone to pick, etc. If you were to say something artsy like "just go with whatever looks good to you" it would blow my mind. I will definitely try your techniques on Needle again from scratch and we'll see if it comes out any better in comparison.

Kazuya

I haven't "upgraded" the right cheekbone yet, contrary to the left one. See the difference? It's subtle but noticable if you look at it. When I'm done with his face and his clothes, I switch to RGB and recolour everything. After that it's time for rescaling and animation.

I was going to ask that as well--were you improving the original picture and then scaling it down, or did you scale it down and then mess with it? I don't even think the cheek difference is subtle--it looks much better, but maybe I notice it more because I was working on almost the same thing.

Kazuya

According to my proportions study, the length of Vinnys neck is still in the normal range. Maybe it looks a bit lengthy, because I gave him a weakly developed trapezius muscle.
if you weaken the trapezius, you can see how incredible long a human neck can be.

Yeah, I suspected as much--like I said, I think it's just an optical illusion because his collar is tall and is somewhat close to parallel with his neck, so it may tend to make his neck look longer than it really is. I guess it's probably more of a fashion issue for Vinny than an artistic issue for you. Kazuya

Did anyone notice that I changed Reubans ears? I also did some small changes to his glasses.

It's funny that you put it that way... that's exactly my problem--I'm a much better scientist than artist. That's why I started drilling you about the "process"--do you start with high tones and go down, how do I know what tone to pick, etc. If you were to say something artsy like "just go with whatever looks good to you" it would blow my mind. I will definitely try your techniques on Needle again from scratch and we'll see if it comes out any better in comparison.

I usually pick a tone with the colour pipette. So if I need a dark skin part, I look for an area where the skin is dark and simply pick it up. If I need to work on the hair, I pick up a colour from there and so on. I lightened the cheekbones with the airbrush tool. Just pick white and use a small brush. Just put a little bit over it. Smoothen the area with the blur tool and your almost good to go.

sorca_2

I was going to ask that as well--were you improving the original picture and then scaling it down, or did you scale it down and then mess with it?

Scientific answer: If you are going to scale it down, do the work first and then the scaling.
If you are going to scale it up, do the scaling first and then work on it.

Ugh. Well, the good news is that I'm pretty happy with how the grayscale work turned out:

The bad news is that, when I got to the recolor step, I could only come up with garbage like this:

What am I missing? How do you balance the colors to get those skin tones? Everything I did was either too red or too yellow no matter what I tried. I even tried sampling a color from Grizzly's pic and it still came out like that.

Ugh. Well, the good news is that I'm pretty happy with how the grayscale work turned out:

The bad news is that, when I got to the recolor step, I could only come up with garbage like this:

What am I missing? How do you balance the colors to get those skin tones? Everything I did was either too red or too yellow no matter what I tried. I even tried sampling a color from Grizzly's pic and it still came out like that.

Well, your description of your steps, doesn't really allow me to pinpoint what went wrong.
But I don't even understand, what exactly the problem is, because I took your grayscale picture and recoloured it, after about 5 minutes, this is what I've got:
Pasting him into the aim_panel looks somewhat okay so far:

The only advice that I can give you right now, is to be a bit mor careful with the blur tool. It's almost always better to blur twice with a slower rate than to blur once with a high rate. Be carefull, that you don't blur the contrasts away, just soften them up a little bit.

Yeah, I knew the blur was a little more than I wanted--that was actually my second try with a lower setting after blurring too much the first time. I'll try it again.

The ears were really weird (like the merc you mentioned before), and I had trouble with the eyes. Blurring them didn't look right, but neither did leaving them pixelated. I ended up drawing on the eyes a little bit and thought they ended up decent enough, though they could use some color.

Mostly it's the recoloring that I was having trouble with. Notice how the second picture I posted isn't close to a skin tone? That was as close as I could get. What process do you use for recoloring? I tried looking up a few tutorials and didn't find anything especially useful. I messed with the RGB balance, hue, saturation, etc. but could never get to a skin tone that looked nice.

I think that second picture was +40 red and -40 blue... somewhere around there.

[quote=sorca_2]Yeah, I knew the blur was a little more than I wanted--that was actually my second try with a lower setting after blurring too much the first time. I'll try it again.

sorca_2

The ears were really weird (like the merc you mentioned before), and I had trouble with the eyes. Blurring them didn't look right, but neither did leaving them pixelated. I ended up drawing on the eyes a little bit and thought they ended up decent enough, though they could use some color.

Don't try to get everything right with the blur tool. That's usually not necessary. Check how the pixelated eyes look after you rescaled them. Most often, you only need to fix them a little bit with the paintbrush or airbrush tool.

sorca_2

Mostly it's the recoloring that I was having trouble with. Notice how the second picture I posted isn't close to a skin tone? That was as close as I could get. What process do you use for recoloring? I tried looking up a few tutorials and didn't find anything especially useful. I messed with the RGB balance, hue, saturation, etc. but could never get to a skin tone that looked nice.

I think that second picture was +40 red and -40 blue... somewhere around there.

Maybe we are talking here about different things. I've got the feeling that you mistake colour adjustment for recolouring. Those are two different things.
This is what my recolouring process looks like. (I was a bit in a hurry, so I forgot to remove the eyes from the recolouring area, but you will get the picture)http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/123/recolourshow.png

The colour adjustment comes in handy, when you realize that your new skin colour is too bright or saturated, etc.

Thanks for that awesome screenshot! Unfortunately, as I may have mentioned in another thread somewhere, about all I can do in German is order torpedo attacks, rig for silent running, etc. (from playing Silent Hunter III with the crew set to speak in German instead of silly default English). I think Google translator will work for me though, and I've done enough digital imaging to get the basic idea once I know a couple of the words. I'll give you an update later--didn't have any motivation to work on JA2 last night, unfortunately.

Edit: So I figured out most of the words pretty quickly, except the most critical one, einfarben. Google said it was "monochrome", but I knew that couldn't be right. Checked some screenshots of the program and saw that the corresponding icon is "colorize", which obviously makes much more sense. I think I've got it now. I'll mess around some more tonight.

for adding of old JA1 merc to Ja 2.13 - I think easiest way how to do id, is (temoraly) replace existing ones with JA1/DG ones - just only for testing purposes (to find how many speech oprtions are missing, coloring them...etc) and after all is bugfixed, then only waiting until coders finish up extending of prof.dat for more mercs.

BTW is here any page/thread about which features are planed/finished (and which ones are finished but need more testing) in 1.13 ? With know bugs with need bughunting but are hard to reproduce ?